Hardy Notebook

ELT 38: 1 1995 not complain. Indeed, he worries that Roberts's journalistic habits" wUl keep him from writing another book as good as The Western Avernus. One puts down this volume grateful to the editors for their continuing high standards in identifying the publications and new people referred to in the letters. The note on Clara CoUet is especially interesting. An eighteen-page introduction charts the changing personal and publishing circumstances affecting Gissing's work; and sixteen illustrations include studio portraits of Gissing in 1893 and 1895, and of five of his new friends. The two modern photographs of his residences, in Brixton and in Epsom, show them to be solidly middle-class. It is in the second of the two houses that he writes the last letter in this volume, to Morley Roberts. It begins with a reference to a past holiday and towards the end moves to a coming one near Yarmouth, where the sea air and sand wül be "good for the boy." Then Gissing breaks off with a cri de cour. "I shall never again speak of my writing. It has become a burden & a toU—nothing else." Fortunately, he wUl not keep his vow: the remaining four volumes wül tell us more of his burden and his toU. Martha S. Vogeler California State University, Fullerton Hardy Notebook Thomas Hardy's 'Studies, Specimens Sec.'Notebook. Pamela Dalziel and Michael MUlgate, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xxvii +164 pp. $39.95 £25.00 OF THOMAS HARDY'S NOTEBOOKS, only eleven miraculously escaped the Max Gate fires in which so many other of his personal records were deliberately destroyed. Of these, the one titled Studies, Specimens Sec. is a most revealing record of his efforts to turn himself into a literary man between 1865 and 1869. Now, a superb scholarly edition of this very important record of Hardy's early literary efforts has been prepared by Pamela Dalziel and Michael MUlgate. Dalziel and MUlgate have provided a leaf-by-leaf typographical facsimile of the original, using photographic representations only of Hardy's shorthand and other non-typographically reproducible symbols , while restoring, when possible, erasures and crossed-out text. Editorial intrusions are minimal: background shading is used to indicate restored erasures; angled brackets signal doubtful readings or unrecoverable erasures; foliation, pagination and Une numbering are added for purpose of reference. Given the complexities of the editorial task, not surprisingly 89 pages of text are accompanied by a greater 86 BOOK REVIEWS number of pages of supporting scholarship: 19 of densely inforniative introductory material, 63 of indispensable annotations, yet another 7 of textual notes, and 4 pages of index. The editors' decision to reproduce the text page-by-page is to my mind the only questionable feature of their procedure. I regret that they did not choose, rather, to incorporate their annotations at the bottom of each edited page and use some convention for marking breaks in the manuscript pages. That would have produce a far more easUy used text: as it is, readers wUl be condemned to move constantly back and forth between text and appended annotations. This one complaint aside, Thomas Hardy's 'Studies, Specimens Sec.' Notebook is not only a model of accuracy but a mine of information about how early in his life Hardy attempted to prepare himsetf for a literary career. What the "Studies" notebook reveals is not only how doggedly but how inventively Hardy went about his task. He includes quotations from a wide range of authors, but these are combined m revealing ways with Hardy's own "explanatory" notes and "additions." Although in large part derived from poetic sources, these particular notes do not reflect Hardy's concern for such matters as metre and poetic form so much as they reveal his interest m the interplay of words and ideas. Entries involve many kinds of comments: definitions, off-hand remarks, and—of particular interest—experimental variations m which we can see Hardy trying out his own alternative uses of words and phrases with, no doubt, the idea of exploiting them in future, as yet unimagined, poems. Dalziel and MUlgate provide an invaluable guide through this thicket of Hardy's uses of quotation...